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You can even search for patents and prior art on an iPad. Is there an app for that?

According to PC Magazine, "it remains to be seen just how many apps from Apple's App Store have been downloaded by the millions of iPad users thus far--around the one-million-sold mark, Apple announced that iPad owners had been busy nabbing more than 12 million apps and 1.5 million eBooks."

Recently, the Commerce Department’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced in this press release that the Government of India has granted the agency’s patent examiners access to a new digital database containing a compilation of traditional Indian knowledge.  Access to the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) is important for both India and the United States to prevent misappropriation of traditional knowledge.

The new database, developed jointly by India’s Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy (AYUSH), includes over 200,000 traditional medicine formulations on Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha comprising 30 million pages.  The TKDL contains text-searchable English-language translations of these sources, permitting USPTO examiners to search thousands of years of India’s accumulated traditional knowledge.  The TKDL also contains translations into French, German, Japanese and Spanish, from these sources, originally written in Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and Urdu.

This database will be an important addition to the growing array of search tools on traditional knowledge from around the world that is already available to USPTO examiners. These tools include dictionaries, formularies, handbooks, and historical or classical works, as well as databases such as the TKDL. USPTO examiners use these tools to help prevent the patenting, and thereby misappropriation, of existing traditional knowledge.

Comments anyone?

Article One Partners, LLC launched as a new global community to legitimize the validity of patents. Community members, who Article One calls Advisors, have an opportunity to send in previously hard to find evidence of validity for high profile patents. By tapping the unique knowledge and referral networks of our Advisors, this publicly available evidence known as prior art can be discovered. Article One analyzes the prior art to determine whether it can show patents to be legitimized or invalid. If Article One forms an opinion that patents are invalid, Advisors earn up to U.S. $50,000, with $1,000,000 total being offered for launch. Advisors who actively build the community also earn premium compensation in Article One's Profit Sharing Plan of about five percent (5%) of the company's net annual profit.

The press release issued by Article One Partners generated a lot of press and buzz in the blogosphere last week, much of it restating the company's PR, but not all of it was uncritical.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt says the new company's business plan "sounds like a photocopy of BountyQuest's original plan."

Julian Sanchez at ars technica thinks this "crowdsourcing patent startup could use dose of own medicine."

What do you think? Will the business methods patent application of Article One Partners get past the prior art of BountyQuest? And what about Bilski?

UPDATE: Cheryl Milone, President, articleonepartners.com comments below.

Apple has finally admitted that a British man who left school at 15 is the inventor behind the iPod, according to news in the Daily Mail. MacWorld is also reporting here that it appears Kramer's claim to have invented some element of the music player was borne out by Apple in its case against Burst.com. Apple flew Kramer to California to give evidence during that trial - Kramer could prove prior art in the case.

Apple used Mr Kramer’s patents and drawings to defend itself in the legal wrangle with Burst last September and he gave evidence under fire from Burst’s lawyers.

Mr Kramer, of Hitchin, Hertfordshire, said: ‘I was up a ladder painting when I got the call from a lady with an American accent from Apple saying she was the head of legal affairs and that they wanted to acknowledge the work that I had done.

‘I must admit that at first I thought it was a wind-up by friends. But we spoke for some time, with me still up this ladder slightly bewildered by it all, and she said Apple would like me to come to California to talk to them.

'Then I had to make a deposition in front of a court stenographer and videographer at a lawyers’ office. The questioning by the Burst legal counsel there was tough, ten hours of it. But I was happy to do it.’

The dispute between Apple and Burst.com has since been settled confidentially out of court.

Mr Kramer said: ‘To be honest, I was just so pleased that finally something that I had done which has been a huge success and changed the music industry was being acknowledged. I was really quite emotional about it all.’

He is now negotiating with Apple to gain some compensation from the copyright that he owns on the drawings.

But so far he has received only a consultancy fee for providing his expertise in the legal case.

Mr. Kramer, who organizes the annual British Invention Show, is now working on an invention he claims will be bigger than the iPod.

By the way, here is a list of that other Kramer's ideas and inventions.

Inequitable conduct cases usually arise out of a failure to notify the patent office of relevant prior art or a prior public use, publication or sale of an invention. Other categories of misconduct include submission of misleading comparative data during prosecution, or misleading the patent office regarding the date of invention. A checklist addressing these areas would include the following:


1. Remind your client of the duty to disclose relevant prior art, including related copending applications (and make sure to file this prior art with the United States Patent and Trademark Office). Make sure that the examiner at the patent office is aware of activity in related cases, if handled by other examiners.
2. Ask about attendance at conferences, posters, and abstracts submitted to journals.
3. Remember to file prior art uncovered in foreign searches.
4. Ask about offers for sale or other public disclosures through use or publication.
5. If you are filing a declaration, make certain that it is clear to the PTO where the interests of the declarant lie. Do not conceal from the PTO facts known to you that are adverse to your client’s position (such as negative data), in order to advance your client’s case.
6. Discuss the date of invention and related evidence with your client.

Keeping a checklist permits one to easily keep track of new developments in the law, by merely updating the checklist as new practice requirements (based on changes in the law) develop. The above checklist is just a start.

Scott’s 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back.

Mr. Giovannoni’s presentation on Friday will showcase additional Scott phonautograms discovered in Paris, including recordings made in 1853 and 1854. Those first experiments included attempts to capture the sounds of a human voice and a guitar, but Scott’s machine was at that time imperfectly calibrated.

“We got the early phonautograms to squawk, that’s about it,” Mr. Giovannoni said.

But the April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk. On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.

The United States Patent and Trademark office has committed to reviewing the patent. As these activities take place we will provide you updates through our patent blog...

Scientific research generates “intellectual property” (IP), that is, new knowledge and ideas belonging to the individual creators who did the research or the enterprises that funded the work. A range of strategies are available to enable scientists and research enterprises to exploit their IP effectively. One such strategy in use by national and international research institutes and private entities is “defensive publication.” While not suitable in all circumstances or for all types of research outcomes, defensive publication can be an effective way to disseminate scientific results in order to preserve the results as a public good.

In addition, some forms of defensive publication enable the scientist/innovator to maintain some control over the use of their results or invention. In a defensive publication, the scientists disclose details about their innovation to the public, thereby preserving their freedom to use the invention by preventing others from patenting it. The link between defensive publication and patenting is the requirement for novelty in a patent application. Since a published description of the research product is available, it can no longer be called new and thus patent-worthy. This is how defensive publishing effectively prevents competitors (and possibly even the originating scientist) from patenting an identical or similar innovation.

The defensive publication route is especially useful for innovations that do not warrant the high costs incurred in patent applications but to which scientists do want to retain access. It is especially useful for agricultural researchers in the public sector, since it is not only a means by which they can communicate results to others. But, when done properly, it serves the additional purpose of forestalling eventual patent awards on the research product described, hence preserving the innovation as a public good.

Commercial companies too are fast adopting defensive publishing as a key element of their IP management strategy. According to Richard Poynder’s analysis in the Financial Times,1 as the costs of patent applications and litigation continue to rise defensive publishing is offering scientists another option: by making published descriptions of their innovative research products available to the public, they prevent others from patenting them, thus they ensure the results’ continued availability without incurring the significant legal and filing fees involved in patenting.

Literature searches are typically a main element of patent grant procedures. Lack of published documentation on an innovation—or lack of such documentation in the literature traditionally reviewed by patent examiners— may indicate to a patent examiner that the innovation is indeed new and worthy of patent protection. Even older innovations might be judged patent-worthy if a search reveals no published record of the invention. In one case, Indian activists challenged the 1995 award of patent rights over products traditionally derived by local communities from the spice turmeric, persuading the US Patent and Trademark Office to revoke the patent by pointing out literature referring to the “invention” published previous to the patent application date. Effective defensive publication thus can keep innovations out of the private domain and open for use by scientists both in the developing and the developed world, without fear of patent infringement on their part or on the part of the end-users of their products.

This Briefing Paper has provided an overview of defensive publishing for institutions weighing the options available for publishing research results and disclosing innovations...In short, if the main concern is to reach a specific audience but there is little interest in using the publication as prior art to trigger the rejection of a patent claim, then self-publication is likely the most cost-effective means of disclosure. But other options should be considered if an organization’s main goal in publishing is to defeat a potential patent application. In this case, using a commercial company that specializes in publications that reach the attention of most patent examiners is the recommended course.